Building WOW Brands That Customers Love

WOW! Cx

Customer Experience Is The New Brand

The race for the best customer experience is on! Companies are finally realizing that if they want to stand out from their competition, they had better start placing much more emphasis on the experience of their customers. Some just don’t get it until its too late. Remember the United Airlines brand crisis, when $1.4 billion in value was wiped out when a passenger went viral on social media? And, you probably aren’t familiar with Juicero, but they had to correct a tainted ingredient and reduce their juicer from $699 to $200. They ultimately went out of business.

Doesn’t matter if it’s customer service, product or service quality or simply whether the customer likes you or not, the customer experience will be the final deciding factor as to whether that customer will continue to do business with you or not.

While 80% of companies believe they deliver “super experiences,” only 8% of customers agree. In other words, companies have a lot of work to do. And, that means there is a great opportunity to pick up market share. Everything a brand does – the way it tells it’s story, it’s market research, advertising, you name it – all play a part in shaping the customer’s experience. Emphasizing customer experience management (CXM) could very well be the most important investment a brand can make in today’s dramatically changed business climate.

And Along Came The Internet

In the old days, you had three options for communicating with companies. You could visit them, you could write a letter or you could call. Then, along came faxing and later email. Today there’s Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and many more. And, when that customer makes a contact, they expect you to know them and to be served on the spot.

And, there are those customers who, if they aren’t treated like they expect, they complain. But they don’t complain to you, they complain to everyone else on the planet through social media. Fortunately, there are those who are happy and they will tell the world also.

With so many channels available today, it would appear that communicating with your customer would be more difficult than ever. And that’s true, technically. But customers today want the same things they have always wanted. And that’s simply to be taken care of. They may demand more and want it faster, but all of this new technology has given us the tools to do just what the customers wants.

It’s The Customer’s Way, or The Highway

And, don’t forget that customers don’t care if you claim to have omni-channel or multi-channel capabilities. They just want you to connect with them, the way they have connected with you, and you’d better make it quick. They’re going through the easiest way for them and the one that they are the most comfortable with.

Just because your company has defined its brand promise doesn’t mean the customer will agreed that you have delivered on that promise. To deliver a great customer experience requires a lot of effort. You can hire the best people and provide world-class training, but you must also give them the tools to be able to deliver the kind of customer experience that will knock their socks off and make them want to come back again, and again and again. Be there for your customer, regardless of how they reach out to you and consistently build your brand with happy customers. At BranWorks, part of the approach we recommend to accomplish that is WOW Branding at every critical touchpoint along the buyers journey. This often determines whether customers become loyal customer or they walk away, never to be seen again.